RMAX stands in contradistinction to conventional training methodologies. This is not, however, meant to solicit controversial debates. Please discard whatever you choose not to believe.

Soviet scientist and physician Alexander Bogomoletz wisely said, "Man is as old as his connective tissues." If you rely on tissue elasticity for flexibility, you'll lose it. You must master the regulation of Selective Tension in order to gain dynamic strength.

Tendons do not need to be maximally stretched to be torn. Tears result from a special combination of sudden stretch and muscular contraction.

Everyone has slipped on ice at some point in his or her life. When you slip on ice your body is thrown off-balance. It reflexively attempts to restabilize the breach of stance integrity. The tissue that you stretch when you slip, say the hamstring or the groin, will contract to the original position. Voila! Tear! It’s caused by a stretch from one side and a simultaneous contraction on the other. This involuntary event is called the stretch reflex: a muscle that is stretched by an external force too far or too fast will contract to oppose the stretch.

Before beginning CST's dynamic strengthening exercises to develop plasticity, you must first learn to regulate muscular tension (in CST parlance - "Selective Tension"). This is not as difficult as it sounds, but it requires a paradigm shift away from conventional methods.

Someone once asked me the following: "CST seems so fluid and supple. Since I am older and not as flexible, I fear that I will not be able to train in your system. Are there exercises to improve my flexibility so that I can begin to train?" Others have said, "I am highly involved in my sport and am concerned about my performance levels. I fear a lack of connective tissue strength. What can I do?"

Debunking the Stretching Myths

The answer is not simple due to the nature of the question. In CST stretching is not considered a particularly high premium health practice. Stretching has been a buzzword for the past twenty or so years, but rarely has anyone been given the opportunity to question whether increasing flexibility is a virtue for health and longevity.

We have seen a significant deterioration in connective tissue strength and pervasive injuries in every sport and at every age level due to the dangerous stretching practices of the conventional fitness industry. There are important myths to debunk. Some of these myths are as follows:

1. Flexibility is the primary characteristic of health and sportive/combative performance. The more flexible you are the better.
2. Flexibility is a form of injury prevention.
3. Injury results from insufficient warm-up to increase flexibility.
4. Injury happens when tissue is stretched maximally.
5. Static stretching is safe and productive. Dynamic Stretching (mobility training and ballistic motion) is unsafe and unproductive.
6. Daily stretching is mandatory for flexibility maintenance.
7. Flexibility requires many years and is the first characteristic to be lost.
8. (The most terrible) Flexibility is gained through elongating the tissues (deformation).

Flexibility vs. Elasticity

Let's first differentiate between the concepts of Flexibility and Elasticity. Flexibility is a measurable range of motion in one specific direction. To increase the flexibility of a tissue you must apply a force pulling the tissue in an isolated range of motion until the stress causes a permanent deformation of that tissue, where it will not return to its original state.

Over the years we cause micro trauma to our tissue from activity. The tissue heals, but only after scar tissue has formed. In healing the scar tissues mends the wound together by pulling and shortening the tissue.

Many people, in the conventional understanding of physical culture, have made the assumption that stretching after activity can prevent the muscle from healing at a shorter length. However, should the stretching manage to prevent shortening (which is debatable), the connective tissues will stiffen regardless. Tendons and ligaments are composed of collagen (lending tensile strength) and elastin (lending elasticity, obviously). As we age our tissues undergo an irreversible process of decreasing elastin and increasing collagen.

Elasticity is a material's ability to return to its original state following deformation after removal of the deforming load. To increase the elasticity of a tissue you must apply a load to the tissue in a range of motion and remove that load after the initial stiffness ceases (discomfort, not pain), but before the tissue is permanently deformed, so that the tissue returns to its original state. This stress increases the capacity for storage of elastic energy.

Stored Elastic Energy and Viscosity

The ability to generate Stored Elastic Energy (SEE) is proportionate to the tensile strength of the tissue. Tensile Strength is the maximum stress that a material can withstand before it breaks. Ductility (how malleable a substance is) decreases as it reaches its tensile strength failure, and conversely the amount of SEE increases as it reaches its tensile strength failure.

This is the concept of Viscosity: the property of an object that demonstrates that a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Many tissues of the human body exhibit constricting, congealing, and thickening characteristics when not exposed to outside forces. The Viscosity of a tissue is its resistance to a force. The greater the viscosity, the greater the force and time required to cause deformation.

To understand this, pull a rubber band in two opposite directions. The more that you pull, the harder it is to pull. For example, if you pull the rubber band one inch, it gains (say) 5 units of SEE. If you pull one more inch, it produces 10 additional units of SEE (15 total). If you pull one final inch, it results in 20 more units of SEE (35 total). The increase is exponential. The farther that you pull the rubber band, the further it will fly when one side is released.

The Stretch Reflex

Tissues adapt to both the intensity and the duration of a stress placed upon them. If the tensile strength of the rubber band is 50 units and you pull the rubber band one final inch (which should produce 40 more units of SEE for a total of 75), the tensile strength of the rubber band has been exceeded. Failure results and it snaps in two. Ultra high degrees of flexibility outside of the natural range of motion of a joint make 'snapping' much more likely. "Stretching Gurus" have used this knowledge to make a leap in logic that says, "injuries occur when a muscle is stretched beyond its limit. So prevent injuries by elongating the muscles of the connective tissues."

This assumption is a physiological falsehood. Tears do not happen because tissues have been maximally stretched (as the stretching pundits would have you believe), but because of the special combination of sudden stretch and contraction called the Stretch Reflex. The Stretch Reflex happens when tissue that is stretched by an external force too far or too fast contracts to oppose the stretch. When a stretch from one side happens simultaneous with a contraction on the other - you have a tear.

We have seen this very frequently in the dance and fitness industries, and in the recent craze involving the pollution of yoga (where hatha yoga is erroneously associated with "static stretching").

Viscoelasticity: Flexibility is Speed Specific

Another erroneous belief states that, if you maintain a certain pull length on the rubber band for an extended time (say at 35 units), the rubber band will begin to deform permanently and as a result "lose" SEE as it loses its degree of elasticity. This region of training is known as Viscoelasticity, having a combination of Viscosity and Elasticity. Viscoelastic materials have time-dependent mechanical properties, being sensitive to the duration of the force application. Such materials will continue to deform over a finite length of time even if the load remains constant, until a state of equilibrium is reached (also known as "creep effect").

High temperatures increase the rate of creep and low temperatures decrease it. For the most effective use of this property the material to be deformed should be warmed, and then have a sufficient load applied over a long period of time. Different tissues respond differently to various rates of loading. When loaded rapidly they exhibit greater resistance to deformation than if they are loaded slowly.

This is why CST's dynamic flexibility cannot be gained through static stretches. Flexibility is speed specific. The "stretch reflex" engages whenever a muscle is stretched suddenly or dramatically, or both. This mechanism is controlled by the muscle spindles, which are two special receptors that activate the Stretch Reflex. One of these is sensitive to stretch magnitude and the other to speed and magnitude. The prevalent static stretch may or may not reset the first receptor, but it is completely ineffective for the second receptor. As a result, flexibility is speed specific. If you've seen CST Head Coach Brandon Jones performing Velocity-Specific CST (get his soon to be released book!) you know exactly how powerful this applied knowledge can be. Monstrously strong!

Health Risks of Static Stretching

The usual practice of the fitness industry is to increase flexibility through static stretching. This is a serious health danger. As we have seen, with age the collagen/elastin ratio changes in favor of collagen. As we grow older the connective tissue is more likely to snap because of the decreased integrity of tissue elasticity.

In our youth the ability to drop into a straddle split seemed like a desirable trick, but it has nothing to do with health and even less to do with longevity. As we grow older we realize that it is not how far in a particular direction we can move but how strong our tissues are, how quickly they resolve deviations in movement and afford us mobile security.

As a result, the first training emphasis in the CST System is: To be flexible in motion ("Real World Flexibility) you must coordinate range of mobility, eventually at your activity's velocity.

Short Range Stiffness

Most people tend to feel 'better' when they go through a 'stretching routine'. They tend to feel 'loose' and more relaxed. This is healthy, but it should be properly understood. Physiologically, when inactive we experience Short Range Stiffness: a mechanical property of the muscle tissue whereby the stiffness is high for the first few millimeters of a stretch. After surpassing this initial short resistance there is a substantial reduction in the stiffness of the tissue. This is a temporary physiological phenomenon, not a permanent one.

We should concentrate on overcoming SRS, but should not proceed to deformation of the tissue. Static stretching is not a means for permanently remaining flexible. Attempting to alter the mechanical properties of our tissues may work when we are children, but it does not work in developed adults. The goal of allowing the organism to be permanently flexible is met through the regulation of muscular tension to govern the stretch reflex.

Plasticity Changes

Plasticity is at the far end of the spectrum from elasticity. It is a quality of a connective tissue, such as a ligament or a tendon. When subjected to ballistic, prolonged, or sudden forces, that exceed the elastic limits of the tissue, the tissue does not return to its original state after the deforming load is removed. The "Anatomical Plastic Region" (APR) of connective tissue is found between 6-10% of the ligament or tendon's resting length, and is at the very wall of failure (to the maximum tissue tensile strength).

From Plasticity we learn that some tissues are less injury prone when stressed rapidly. For instance, ligaments are composed of wavy collagen fibers. Uncoiled, the fibers become taught and susceptible to injury. If taken into the APR, the ligament tears. Whereas slow loading uncoils through taking the slack out of the fibers, quick loading does not allow sufficient time to enter the APR.

The properties of cartilage are equally less injury-prone when quickly loaded. Cartilage decreases the stress in a joint by decreasing the friction coefficient between bones, and through distributing load over the surface of the joint complex. Cartilage is composed of 20-40% collagen and 60-80% water. Cartilage behaves with the properties of water in a sponge. When it is compressed it decreases the protection between bones. However, with rapid loading the fluid does not have sufficient time to be squeezed out and shock absorption is maximal.

Discomfort is productive; pain is unproductive. This is completely subjective, and so there must be a dialogue/feedback between you and your CST Instructor, or at the very least between you and your journal/blog.

We do not stretch in isolation for its own sake. We do not stretch in isolation (since isolation is the biggest myth!) to induce permanent deformation of the tissue with the goal of increasing flexibility. To begin increasing the plasticity of the body, we stretch locally until Short Range Stiffness is removed. This is a very short and insignificant aspect of preparation. We then move to engage the organism through a complete range of motion.

There are simple biomechanics involving one joint matrix (such as large arm circles through the 135 degree range of motion), and there are complex ranges of motion comprising multi-joint matrixes that require lengthy text to describe (and must be modeled and then experienced kinesthetically). These complex biomechanics are the crux and cornerstone of CST. All of this boils down to the fact that the primary characteristic of maximal flexibility lies in the regulation of the Stretch Reflex through sensitivity to muscular tension, and in the cultivation of Plasticity and Viscoelasticity of tissues through Body-Flow's Biomechanical Exercise™ and Kinetic Chaining.

Seminars and workshops on the CST System are an ideal way to gain insight into how to develop and augment your personal health regimen.